The Shared Drive: Issue 07
For Issue 7 I’ll be looking to a few recent studio visits, and spotlighting an absolutely fantastic artist and her recently opened mega solo show. I’m also excited to share a new project that I have been working on with SPEIRO PROJECTS. Contributions to the Shared Drive will focus on a number of really special shows that are opening / have opened, as well as a book which just KEEPS being recommended to me (so much so that I’ve finally ordered it myself)!
I hope you enjoy reading, and as ever, feedback is always welcome!
J x
Studio Diaries: Ellie Wang
Yesterday I was invited to visit current Good Eye Projects Resident, Ellie Wang. On a blustery and cold April day, it was lovely to be welcomed into Ellie’s studio, and spend over an hour discussing her beautiful practice.
In Ellie Wang's paintings, life finds expression through a blend of her Chinese-British heritage and a deep exploration of the senses. Through her art, she seeks to preserve the essence of moments, places, and people that have shaped her experiences.
Drawing from her Chinese-British heritage, Wang infuses her artworks with sensory references, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in the emotional, psychological, and physical contexts of the depicted scenes. Through a masterful interplay of colours, Wang intertwines olfactory, gustatory, and visual elements, crafting narratives that resonate on a deeply visceral level.
Central to Wang's creative process is the art of storytelling, where each canvas becomes a chapter in the unfolding saga of life. Delving into the infra-ordinary and endotic aspects of existence, Wang shines a spotlight on the often-overlooked gestures and habits that define our daily lives. Time, place, and location often blur in Ellie’s paintings. Sometimes taking a photograph as her starting point, Ellie segments her paintings into different, but most often related, storylines. The intricately drawn and heavily outlined figure is a recurring motif in many of Ellie’s works, simultaneously present and fleeting - they are references to memory, without explicitly being memories. Ellie was very clear with me in our discussions that she feels that it is too simplistic to say that her work depicts memories - before you are able to pinpoint exactly what is being shown, or where, or even who, the image dissolves, leaving you in an artist-psyche limbo .
With each brushstroke, Wang creates meditative portraits that reflect the evolution of life and identity. Her paintings serve as a record of growth and transformation, both as an artist and as an individual navigating the complexities of cultural heritage and personal identity.
Throughout her work, Ellie invites viewers to join her on a journey of discovery, where every canvas tells a story—a testament to the beauty and complexity of the human experience.
I also visited the studio of fellow Good-Eye artist Isabella Benshimol. To Read some musings on that, have a look on instagram here.
THE FUTURE OF BELONGING - SPEIRO PROJECTS
Opening this coming Wednesday 1st May SPEIRO PROJECTS are launching their inaugural project THE FUTURE OF BELONGING. I was thrilled to be invited to write the supporting texts and catalogue essay for the project.
Speiro Projects is a not for profit art initiative that serves as a bridge between the artistic communities of the East and West. Committed to nurturing emerging talent, the platform offers young artists a unique platform to showcase their creativity and vision. Through a series of temporary projects, Speiro Projects provides comprehensive support tailored to the specific needs of each artist, including mentorship, resources, and promotional assistance.
Please do join for the private view between 6-9pm on the 1st May, and stay tuned for a talk between myself and some special guests - details to be announced.
An extract of my text is below:
Over the past two decades, a vibrant cohort of diaspora Chinese artists has emerged, leaving an indelible mark on the landscape of contemporary art. Many of these artists, having honed their skills at prestigious colleges and art institutions abroad, immerse themselves in global art trends and techniques. Armed with a rich palette of artistic vocabulary, they navigate beyond traditional Chinese motifs, integrating diverse influences into their work.
A two-part exhibition, The Future of Belonging presents the diverse practices of seven artists— Max Lee, Yi Liu, Shuang Jiang, KV Duong, Ningyue Qian, Qinyao Dai, Zhenlin Zhangi—intersecting at the crossroads of Chinese heritage, diasporic identity, and contemporary artistic expression. Through painting, installation, performance, and mixed media, this exhibition traverses themes ranging from mythology and spirituality to societal norms and cultural assimilation, going beyond geographical boundaries to address issues that resonate universally.
The selected artists’ cultural identities are, as a consequence, as multifaceted as their art; encompassing a spectrum of labels including Asian, Eurasian, British East Asian, and beyond. Rejecting the limitations of a singular ethnic categorization, they embrace a myriad of identities—from feminist to queer, migrant to cosmopolitan—reflecting the complexities of modern existence and offering profound insights into the Chinese diaspora experience.
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: Pia Ortuño
I have been lucky enough to know and work with Costa-Rican artist Pia since her graduation from the RCA a couple of years ago. I showed a number of Pia’s works at the inagural exhibition at Pictorum way back in 2022, and have been following her career closely since then.There are few artists as dedicated, and meticulous, as Pia. (Her studio is probably the most organised place I have ever visited). As a result, I was so excited to see install shots from ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’, a phenomenal solo exhibition currently on display at Duarte Sequira Gallery, in Portgual.
Earlier this year, I was at Pia’s studio, watching her make some of her monumental works that feature in ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’. Seeing them completed, and displayed in such a beautiful space, is really quite moving. In this show, Pia returns to her roots as a marble carver in Carrara, transforming Duarte Sequeira into a mesmerising landscape reminiscent of a mountain, a furnace, and a church.
At the heart of the exhibition stands a monumental hand-built architectural altar, symbolising the convergence of spirituality and worship within a collapsed landscape. Ortuño's exploration of personal and cultural narratives, intertwined with her experimentation with new forms of art-making, marks a significant expansion of themes that have shaped her artistic journey.
Using chisels to carve and mark surfaces, Pia skillfully plays with light and shadow, infusing her works with raw pigment, oil paint, rusted metals, and marble dust. These elements, inspired by the artist’s Costa Rican heritage, create a vibrant and immersive palette rooted in the colours of nature, evoking a sense of loss and transformation akin to a tortured and scorched earth.
The exhibition's title, borrowed from John Martin's apocalyptic masterpiece 'The Great Day of His Wrath', conjures imagery of Earth splitting open under divine judgment. Drawing parallels to the dynamited passageways and scarred rock faces of Carrara's quarries, Ortuño reflects on the void left behind—a theft of time from the earth itself.
Inside the underground gallery space, Ortuño's new paintings emerge from blocks, mirroring the laborious process of mining, hewing, and shipping marble. As the blocks migrate between paintings, each work informs and completes the other in an endless cycle of possibilities, echoing the perpetual transformation inherent in both nature and artistic creation.
The exhibition runs until the 1st of June, so if you find yourself in Braga, Portugal - go see it!
Contributions To The Shared Drive
For this week’s contributions, I’ll be sharing some exciting projects, exhibitions and a book that has come highly recommended.
THE FUTURE OF BELONGING (PART I & PART II), SPEIRO PROJECTS
2nd May - 12 May, Opening 1st May 6-9pm, with performances by selected artists throughout the running
Speiro Projects proudly presents its inaugural exhibition, The Future of Belonging (Part I & Part II), featuring the works of seven emerging Chinese artists in various mediums including installation, painting, print-making, and performance. Presented by Speiro Projects and Sukii Lu, the exhibition will take place at 67 Great Titchfield Street, with a Private View on Wednesday, 1st May.
The Future of Belonging features works by Max Lee, Yi Liu, Shuang Jiang, KV Duong, Ningyue Qian, Qinyao Dai, Zhenlin Zhang. Each artist explores themes of identity, belonging, and cultural heritage through their diverse practices, physically separated by the architecture of the space.
STAINLESS, Anna Clegg, a solo exhibition at Soup
25th April - 1st June
“Anna Clegg’s paintings oscillate between quotidian observations of interiors to close-up portraits. Arranged at Soup like a circuitous train of thought, we witness sights from her kitchen and the interior of a gallery, as well as studies of musicians and album covers. But it’s in these arbitrary encounters where she traces a deeper meditation about how memories are valued, applying paint like words fixed to the page of a diary. Clegg is drawn to reading published diaries and auto-fiction, striving for her paintings to emulate their meandering distillations of emotion. She notes ‘the societal obsession for nostalgia and youth’, pairing images she finds with glimpses of alcoves from her own flat.” - Ted Targett
WOOD WIDE WEB, Isabella Lolita, Keisuke Azuma, Ben Große-Johannböcke, Natalia Janula
25th of April - 2nd of May
The term Wood Wide Web was coined in the 1990s by Dr Suzanne Simard, and references the way trees and plants are connected, how they communicate, as well as help and heal one another via their roots underground. In a rather poetic simile, the work these artists create are also connected, as their ongoing thematics all deal with frequency and vibration that happen not only in nature as a way of communication in nature, but also in the societal and spiritual dimensions — with energies and phenomena we can and cannot see. The practices of the artists showcased are connected through a preoccupation with communication, translation and information storage.
Group exhibition curated by Vittoria Beltrame
CODE NEW STATE, Emmanuel de Carvalho at Gathering
26th April - 1st June, opening Friday 26th April, 6-8pm
“CODE NEW STATE will showcase a collection of monumental paintings alongside two sculptural installations spread across the two gallery floors. The works reflect on perception as a neurobiological construct while exploring the notion of plasticity, as elucidated by the French philosopher Catherine Malabou. The images are steeped in unreality through subtle distortions of perspective and depth, creating a lingering sense of discomfort by disrupting the viewer’s anticipatory responses.” - Gathering
CHILDREN OF THE FUTURE, Fani Parali at Cooke Latham
26th April - 2nd June, opening Thursday 25th April, 6-9pm, with live performances throughout the opening.
“Children of the Future is a new, site-specific, installation by Fani Parali for which Cooke Latham Gallery has been transformed into an immersive stage set for the lip-synched 'opera' which will be premiered on the 25th April. The floor of the space is entirely covered with an unapologetically theatrical and unifying painted design. This can be read as an excavation, as though the epidermis of the gallery has been peeled away and the ‘workings’ beneath revealed.” - Cooke Latham
GET THE PICTURE: A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See by Bianca Bosker
This book KEEPS being recommended to me by friends - I bit the bullet yesterday, and bought it - so far, so good!
In GET THE PICTURE, Bosker plunges deep inside the world of art and the people who live for it: gallerists, collectors, curators and, of course, artists themselves - the kind who work multiple jobs and let their paintings sleep soundly in the studio while they wake up covered in cat pee on a friend's couch. As she stretches canvases until her fingers blister, talks her way into A-list parties full of billionaire collectors, has her face sat on by a nearly naked performance artist and forces herself to stare at a single sculpture for an hour straight while working as a museum security guard, she discovers not only the inner workings of the art-canonization machine but also a more expansive way of living.